If only life was so simple.

Like you I try to hide my face and my tears
for my boy-god and my longing for some kind of miracle.

I did not plant you, but I grew up alongside you
and have known you for almost forty years.

So close you were invisible
and I never asked
your name.

Hellbeborus, ‘to kill, to injure, food.”

You are dark green evergreen life and bones.

You remind me of cartilage creaking in my bad knees
when they are not tracking right like the sound
of a rocking horse or a rocking chair
or the fall of a doll’s house.

Memories creak and my attempts to forget them.

If not for my knees I would run forever,
until skeletal – the perfect rose.

Like you I am happy to stay in place
repeating the same patterns and the same cycles
yet the world will not have it that way – it likes to break us
and remove us from our habits and our homes

to journey by candlelight or dead starlight
to the land of the King of Bones

whilst the sound of spring flowers
opening is the sound of something happening.

The lampshade over my face disguises my identity.

All I want is to stay another forty years, repeating the same patterns
over again, but I hear another king is trying to build a road
to Annwn from the bones of his enemies.

This poem addresses the hellebores in my back garden. It is partly based on frustrations with minor health problems. I have recently been diagnosed with rosacea (facial redness) and it has made me feel even less like showing my face in public. After cutting down my running over winter, as I’m increasing my mileage, my anterior knee pain ‘runner’s knee’ has returned. After hoping strength training had cured it, it is holding me back from attaining my goal of returning to 30 miles a week. The boy-god I speak of, also the King of Bones, is a guise of Gwyn, my patron God, a King of Annwn, has been appearing to me in as I write about Annwn before the creation of the world, long before humans and medieval tales.